Detection and resolution of data-flow differences in business process models

Abstract

Business process models have an important role in enterprises and organizations as they are used for insight, specification or configuration of business processes. After its initial creation, a process model is very often refined, by different business modelers and software architects in distributed environments, in order to reflect changed requirements or changed business rules. At some point, the different resulting process model versions need to be merged in an integrated version. In order to enable comparison and merging, an approach which comprises difference representation as well as a discovery method for differences is needed. Regarding control-flow, such approaches already exist. As the specification of data-flow is also important, an approach for dealing with data-flow differences is also needed. In this paper, we propose a model for representation of data-flow differences as well as a method able to discover, visualize, and resolve data-flow differences.